There are not a lot of things on the internet that irritate me more than spam. I go to great lengths to configure my email server to weed out the spam and only deliver the emails I want to receive. I can do this because I have control over the email server and the associated anti-spam systems.

Recently I have noticed a sharp rise in twitter spam. Squarespace, a blog (amongst other things) hosting company in the states recently announced they were to give away 30 new iPhones to people who included #squarespace in their tweets. This took off like wikd fire and at one point they were generating 170 mentions PER MINUTE! Well worth it from their point of view.

Unfortunately this campaign resulted in innocent bystanders getting flooded with tweets by desperate, greedy twitterers trying to get a free iPhone at the expense of pissing off the people who are following them.

My guess is in the next month or two we will see the major players in the twitter game producing 3rd party products to filter the spam from twitter. Seesmic Desktop and Tweetdeck would be where my money goes. Twitter is manic enough once you get enough people in your follow list, without having half of them generating veritable white noise.

I guess this was inevitable really. Every service that comes about (mass mail, email, sms etc) gets abused, and someone always fights back against it. It is just a bit sad that a form of communication which started out so simple will soon require plugins just to filter the wheat from the chaff.

There are two things I have learned from this. Firstly, that while this constant spamming is inevitable, where people get irritated there is usually a solution around the corner. Secondly, Squarespace will not be getting any of my money, ever.

Before you make a dash for the “back” button, bear with me. I promise this is not another attempt to jump on the “twitter as a marketing tool” bandwagon.

The Internet seems to be on fire with people either marketing themselves on twitter, trying to find out how to market themselves on twitter, or trying to find others to listen to their (usually expensive) method of marketing themselves on twitter.

Personally I am getting fed up of it. I see people day in day out trying to use twitter to get something for nothing. They rapidly get as many followers as possible and then start bleeting about their blog posts, their company, or their products. Enough already!

I liken it to some idiot standing in the town centre shouting at the top of his voice how fantastic his skills are in whatever field he works in. Do you think people would listen. Hell no, most people would cross the road to avoid such an imbecile.

So why do people keep doing it? Because the don’t understand. They see it as a captive audience who they can dish out their message to. The trouble with captive audiences is they put up defenses. When approached by someone in the street with a sign-up form, most people are armed with the “no” response even before they make contact. Sound familiar?

What most people miss is the opportunity to gain respect, take part, make friends and most importantly to help others. I say most importantly because firstly it gives you that warm feeling inside, knowing that you have helped another individual, and secondly because human nature dictates (for most of us) that if someone helps us, we want to help them in return. So, answer questions when you get chance (yes, even the daft ones!) and provide information when you have it. Before long your reputation will grow and then you will earn the right to be listened to.

This does not mean said person that you helped will be reaching for their wallet and looking for the “buy it now” button. What it does mean is that this person will listen to your message with an open mind, and have more propensity to see what you say in a positive light. From that basis you can open communication.

So, if you see emails/tweets/blog post offering “get rich quick” schemes, or “get 10k followers on 1 day” schemes, please do me a favour (and yourself) and block them/delete them/get as far away from them as possible. All they do is clutter up what is actually a very lively and friendly social network.

If you are looking for a moral to this blog post (should blog posts have morals… dunno?) then it would simply be “treat others as you would like them to treat you”. Twitter is great for that!

I have been running with the Entrecard system for a few weeks now and have been largely impressed with it. I like the way it brings new people to the site, and although traffic hasn’t increased dramatically it has brought a few regular posters in, which in my mind is a great thing.

One thing I have noticed though is from the amount of cards getting submitted for approval to go on my site, roughly 25% are nothing to do with my subject matter (ok, that is not necessarily a problem), but 25% simply look bad.

I spent a great deal of time crafting my site to look a certain way, and I expect entrecards to look neat and tidy and not an eyesore on my site. I don’t mind if there is not a great deal of design work, plain text on a coloured background would be fine, but a JPG graphic compressed to the extent it looks “muddy” is not going on my site, however good the content.

Do people really expect to get their adverts approved, when their cards look horrible? It’s like turning up to a job interview with an un-ironed shirt with yesterdays dinner on it!

I came across an archived post by Stuart Brown at Modern Life detailing the statistics of the top 10 most common passwords on the Internet. It is shocking how lax people are with passwords. Are they so relaxed about locking their car or their homes, I think not.

What is it about the internet that makes people feel they don’t need to be secure? Is it safety in numbers or what? Do they think they won’t be “chosen” to be hacked? Who knows

Can you guess what the most common password is?

Click the link to find out